Raygun

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of communications for a pension fund firm. Our sole mission is to provide retirement benefits for young women employees throughout the US.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with  Raygun?

When I was hired in February, everything, including the website, the branding, and the logo, was very outdated. The main role that I had this year was to relaunch the website and give the organization a brand new look and feel. I was looking to hire an agency that had the technical and design expertise to do that. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The scope of Raygun’s work involves coming up with a new brand identity, web architecture, and web design as well as frontend development and Craft CMS setup. Because another developer is working on the self-service end of our website, we also need Raygun to provide them with templates. That way, both of the sites will look similar to each other. 

Raygun will also implement a login system into that self-service portal, but for now, it’s not exactly a fully interactive UX yet. Throughout the project, we work very closely together, so they provide some tech support as well.

What is the team composition?

I work with three people from Raygun regularly: their designer Ami (Graphic Designer) and the two principals, Stacey (Co-Founder & Design Director) and Dalton (Co-Founder & Technology Director).

Dalton has done all the coding and the implementation, and Stacey is somewhere in the middle. She’s very design-minded, so she’s been involved mostly in the beginning when we were figuring out the website structure.

How did you come to work with  Raygun?    

The first thing I did when I was hired was to investigate which kinds of one-stop-shop companies could execute our project. We needed a team that could do it within the timing and budget that we were looking for. I talked to about 16 companies before gradually narrowing it down.

In the end, it came down to Raygun and one other large company. For a company like us that had never done anything like this project before, I liked that Raygun was small and very personable.

When I first spoke with Stacey about our targets, she asked me really great questions. She asked what we wanted to get out of this project, not just in a technical sense. She wanted to know what the broader goals of the organization were. I felt that she really understood why we set out to do the project — not just what we wanted to do and how.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost of the project up to now is $65,000. They weren’t the cheapest, but they weren’t the most expensive.

What is the status of this engagement?

We signed an agreement on March 24, 2020, and the partnership is ongoing. We’re not live yet, and we’re entering into an agreement for maintenance and support next year, which we’re finalizing. We’re also exploring live data entry implementation for some of the forms that we have on the site, so we will continue to work with Raygun.
 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

I don’t have metrics yet, but one of the things we did before this project was to survey fund participants and administrators on their understanding of what we do. We want to survey again after a certain period of time to see if we’ve helped alleviate any pain points that we had.

As for right now, Raygun was able to get all of the branding work passed. My staff and the board of trustees had unanimous enthusiasm, which was not something that I expected. Raygun hit upon a design that helps define our organization and what it wants to be. Everyone fell in love with it right away, which made my job a lot easier.

One of the keystones of the website and branding is an art deco design that they came up with. Everyone loved it so much that it’s on the front door of our new office. The branding that they came up with has carried all the way through to the new interior design — that’s how much of a success it was.

How did Raygun perform from a project management standpoint?

Raygun’s a small group, but everyone is really excellent at what they do. One of the things that drew me to them was that I knew that I wouldn’t be talking to someone who wasn’t in the project from the beginning. Stacy and I have been having the conversation since March that we’re always up to speed, and they’re excellent at what they do.

We’ve been using Basecamp, and it works really well. I’ve worked with a lot of different project tracking software, and I’m usually not a fan of them. I’ve found Basecamp to be user-friendly, and if there’s something really urgent, we’ll just go over an email or ping each other.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’ve been very responsive to the fact that we’re not a typical organization and that we have to run everything past the board to get approvals. We built into the agreement that there would be some flexibility and a lot of time for reviews. They’ve been very understanding.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The site has had some holdups because we’re working with another developer. Also, any holdups that we’ve had were the result of the multitude of misunderstandings on our side with how quickly we were going to move. It’s nothing that I would put on Raygun, and generally, I’ve found them to be really responsive.

Our review process has to work internally, and anytime I felt as if we were not going in the right direction, they were able to take my feedback and pull the project back. They’ve done a lot of their independent research.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

See their size as a strength. I think there can be a tendency to think that if you have a large team at every conference, it means that you’re going to have a smoother experience.

I would say that that’s not the case at all. It can be great to be on a first-name basis with every single person who’s involved with every aspect of your project. I also mentioned to Stacy that aside from the work that they’ve done with nonprofits in the past, we were also attracted to the idea that smaller can be better.